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Michael Chabon: so boring, I wonder how anyone finishes his books.
Chuck Palahniuk: shitty, sloppy, bad writer: at least what I've read.
Salman Rushdie: overrated, long-winded: expands to a paragraph what could be better said in a sentence. The odd moment of brilliance.
Zadie Smith: I found White Teeth to be Rushdie-lite.
William Gibson: tries to be cool, ends up coming across like an ass, with that wannabe noir shit.
John Updike: another over-writer. Dude, we don't need all that detail. Get on with the story and stop thinking you're James Joyce. You're really not.
Neil Gaiman: I've only read Anansi Boys, and it was pretty bad. Willing to give him another couple of chances.
Richard K. Morgan: read half of Altered Carbon and it was one cliche after the next.
Don DeLillo: seriously underwhelmed by White Noise.
Thomas Pynchon: I find him unreadable, and his attempts to be funny, obnoxious.

I just forced myself to finish Embassytown by China Mieville. Man, it was a struggle. I found the prose was often overblown and the writing arrogant, as if he were making a conscious effort to be 'literary'. The plot felt empty and underdeveloped, and the narrator was pretty much absent the whole time. Very disappointing, as I loved Perdido Street Station.

I used to love Koontz when I was younger. I read at least fifteen or so of his books. Then, at some point it hit me: every God damn book follows the EXACT same formula. The only one I can remember offhand is the crazy government conspiracy (there were a LOT of those) or some lame paranormal occurrence. All the characters were drawn in broad strokes (no shades of gray for Mr. Koontz, the good guys are always completely flawless and the bad guys are irrepressibly, unmistakably evil without a hint of a good quality). There's almost always a dog. Fuck, does that guy love his dogs. The world to him is good versus evil, in the very sort of straight-forward, God fearing sense. Once I saw this formula for what it was (I think being a bit older had something to do with it) I completely gave up on him (except for the third book in the Midnight Bay trilogy- I'll come back for that, if he ever writes it which, fourteen years after the last one, I doubt will ever happen).

I do have a soft spot for a few of his books, though. I still like Odd Thomas and am looking forward to the movie (though I think they'll probably botch it).

I just forced myself to finish Embassytown by China Mieville. Man, it was a struggle. I found the prose was often overblown and the writing arrogant, as if he were making a conscious effort to be 'literary'. The plot felt empty and underdeveloped, and the narrator was pretty much absent the whole time. Very disappointing, as I loved Perdido Street Station.

I loved it! Granted, it goes on too long, and it's no PSS, but I thought it clever and engrossing. But even in PSS I felt his prose to be "arrogant" and "literary": Mieville shows off and struts his stuff, that's his thing. He's like a literary peacock.
Couldn't get beyond about 80 pages of Kraken though.

I read Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero on successive train rides and fucking hated the hell out of it, but I also somehow suspect that was the desired response. Ellis reads like the jaded 1980s version of Chuck Palahniuk, where instead of peppering the books with filthy sex and scatological shockery it's cheap glittery sex and general 1980s cokey debauchery, a look-how-beautiful-and-horrible caricature that not only pandered to feelings on that decade for those who began their hangover before it ended or sought to justify their darkest suspicions, but itself came to sort of strongly influence the way we reflected on it later—until everyone just got the hell over it and chucked most of the half-true narrative. To that end, I can respect its accomplishment; as a read, it was an exhausting and monotonous slog from one gaudy set-piece filled with pointedly bland people to the next, as if to give readers time to pat their own backs and say to themselves, "How wonderful I am, that I am a real person who feels things, right?" But then I don't remember much of it, as this was so very long ago.

And while we're here, everything I've read by Palahniuk was awful, but Lullaby was probably the worst, treading as it did so perilously close to the line of supermarket check-out mass-market paperbacks in the sub-Koontz vein.

Michael Chabon: so boring, I wonder how anyone finishes his books.
Chuck Palahniuk: shitty, sloppy, bad writer: at least what I've read.
Salman Rushdie: overrated, long-winded: expands to a paragraph what could be better said in a sentence. The odd moment of brilliance.
Zadie Smith: I found White Teeth to be Rushdie-lite.
William Gibson: tries to be cool, ends up coming across like an ass, with that wannabe noir shit.
John Updike: another over-writer. Dude, we don't need all that detail. Get on with the story and stop thinking you're James Joyce. You're really not.
Neil Gaiman: I've only read Anansi Boys, and it was pretty bad. Willing to give him another couple of chances.
Richard K. Morgan: read half of Altered Carbon and it was one cliche after the next.
Don DeLillo: seriously underwhelmed by White Noise.
Thomas Pynchon: I find him unreadable, and his attempts to be funny, obnoxious.

Funny... I'd say that Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, William Gibson, and John Updike are all amazing. Rushdie might be a bit overrated, but the two books I read were pretty great all in all.

Though I'd agree with Palahniuk, if only because Snuff and Pygmy were quite possibly the worst books I've ever read. I still like Fight Club though. And with regards to Neil Gaiman, it's weird that you read Anansi Boys before American Gods. He's fun, but he's nothing extraordinary in my opinion.

I guess to throw in my two cents, I still haven't read anything by Dean Koontz that doesn't completely suck, Dan Brown is really lame, I personally hated every Harry Potter book I read and I can't stand the fanboy love. I really can't stand Jane Austin... I've been forced to read four books by her, and every one of them has made me want to shoot myself.

Ha, this is the first time that I've seen people bitching about Palahniuk. I started Choke a while ago but never came back to it, so after everyone kept pushing me to finally read Fight Club I gave in and gave him another chance. While I really love the movie I disliked the book. I don't know what it was, but it left me so cold... Some scenes and dialogue were great (mainly those which made it into the movie), but for the most part I was utterly bored and everything seemed stitched together and all over the place. Good to see I'm not the only one disliking (not hating) his work. One day I'll finish Choke though.

On topic: I just recently revisited some of the novels I had to read in school. While really hating them with all my heart back then I came to enjoy some of them. Now reading them with an open mind freely and with no school-made restrictions. Overanalyzing and/or presenting works in a forced environment can really destroy any form of otherwise good and enjoyable literature.

One book I will always hate nevertheless is the Reader and I still can't believe that it was made into an equal god awful movie. Jeez...

I wish I could remember the name of this book to warn all of you. I happened to pick it up for a few books, the description on the back seemed pretty cool, so I bought it. The book was a really interesting modern 'bigfoot' story, and delved into a company genetically engineering these creatures for some effect I cannot recall. Cut to the last several pages (of a really long book) and the whole story was a front for a pro-life, Christian slant demonizing any type of gene therapy, stem cell reseach, etc...The ending was a big PSA on the evils of modern science and that we needed to get back to god.

Long story short (too late), it made reading Palahniuk's last few books seem enjoyable.

I loved it! Granted, it goes on too long, and it's no PSS, but I thought it clever and engrossing. But even in PSS I felt his prose to be "arrogant" and "literary": Mieville shows off and struts his stuff, that's his thing. He's like a literary peacock. Couldn't get beyond about 80 pages of Kraken though.

Perhaps I wasn't in the right frame of mind for it, I'd like to go back and give it a second go. Currently 200 pages into The Scar and loving it. His ideas and concepts that so imaginative in contrast to the usual fantasy/SF tropes.

the worst books questions is kinda interesting, if a book is completely terrible, chances are it isn't something i'd bother with even trying to read, and if i haven't read it, i then can't really talk shit about either.

so in that vein of books that were good enough to read, yet fundamentally disappointing -

i gotta say game of thrones, everything after book 1. i find this series incredibly frustrating and abysmally edited. too much extra crap going on, too many plotlines and hooks that go nowhere, too many other things that just seem to have dropped off the face of the map, and the continuing run of unresolved cliffhanger endings followed by a 5-6 year span before the next book.

there are a lot of things the series does very well, but is also deeply flawed.

I always finish the books I'm reading. Some may take a while longer than others if I can't be arsed to bother about the story or the characters, but I can't help reading the whole thing anyway.

Yet, "Flashback" by Dan Simmons ? Just couldn't. Alright, I disagree with his political views, and the book might as well be named "Thanks Obama !", since that's the premise of the whole dystopia Simmons builds, but at least try to be clever, or subtle ? Or simply, not full of hate, because holy shit, fuck the japanese, the democrats, those hispanics, the muslims, the left, fuck Europe, fuck the poor... Because they're gonna lead us to Armageddon. Hide your kids, hide your wife..

And that's a shame because so far, even though I could note that the quality of his books was weakening (Olympos was a huge mess of great and bad ideas glued together, in the hope that their combined mass would make it stand on its own), I still enjoyed them from time to time but this is incredibly bad...

This thread seems mostly controversial literary opinions rather than genuinely 'worst' books ever. Someone lent me 'fifty shades of grey' which is absolutely the worst thing I've ever 'skim read from page 5 or so to find the rude bits which were really badly written anyway'
oh and The Da Vinci Code was awful too

Some parts, taken by themselves, were absolutely brilliant, but as a whole the work was bogged down by too much tiresome, free-written crap that it ruins everything. I really think it could be edited down to 150 pages (with 50 pages of footnotes).

I read the entire thing in two days during rehearsals in Las Vegas, for two reasons.
1) A coworker kept saying "I'll let you rip on it all you want once you've actually read it," and
2) I really, really hate Las Vegas, so I had plenty of free time.

What did I learn? The writing itself told me that the author had the linguistic skills of a sixth grader, and the popularity of the book told me that the US population has the reading skills and horniness to match.

I don't have anything at all against BDSM. But an unimaginative and poorly written book about a young, naive woman falling for a guy who beats the shit out of her just because he's hot and wealthy should not be on any self respecting country's "Best Sellers" list.

I keep trying to get into Faulkner but his writing style puts me off. Same with Upton Sinclair, tried The Jungle and Oil! and couldn't finish either. Agree about Jane Eyre, didn't enjoy it at all. To Kill a Mockingbird is waaaaaaaay overrated.

Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, by David Wong (the guy that wrote the incredibly funny book "John Dies At The End" which was adapted to film).

I put his new book here because it's such a letdown. I had the sneaking suspicion he was a one hit wonder after the sequel to John Dies At The End (This Book Is Full Of Spiders) turned out to be so-so. Anyways, this new book continues the decline in quality.

It's maddening because there are moments of hilarity and smarts... and the book continuously messes with your expectations about what will happen next... but overall.. just not enough funny bits.. like.. John Dies At The End was a work of comedic and horror genius... This new book.. not at all..

He's currently writing the 3rd book in the John Dies At The End series.. I'm going to read reviews before buying that one.